Has China become a neo-colonizer, exporting its cultural and economic power to the world based on its agenda of building soft power? Existing scholarship on neocolonialism and data colonialism largely focuses on how China’s infrastructural expansion and increasingly platformised cultural sectors can achieve its ambitious platformised cultural sectors overseas. Yet, how China’s cultural power is manifested, negotiated, or resisted in people’s daily lives in a South–South setting remains under-researched and under-theorised. This article uses everyday fashion in Kenya as a case study to investigate China’s cultural and economic power expansion in the Global South. We examined how cultural differences are negotiated and mediated on two Chinese(-invested) e- commerce platforms. Through focus groups and platform walkthrough method, our findings serve to enrich existing theories of cultural production–platform relationships applicable in the study of various cultural and creative sectors, to offer new understandings of how symbolic, sociopolitical and cultural meanings of fashion are constructed through divergent platform affordances, and to reveal the various forms of cultural negotiations and resistance in different contexts, multiplying our frames of reference.

Tommy Tse is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and is currently a Visiting Scholar (Jan–Mar 2026) at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, as well as Visiting Fellow (2025–2026) at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. His research explores platform economies, creative and digital labour, consumer culture, and fashion. He leads the ERC-funded project China (Africa) Fashion Power, a five-year ethnographic study of fashion and cultural economies across Asia and Africa. For details, see: https://www.tommyhltse.com 

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